Arab Mediterranean youth: Political and religious participation

© CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). Using data from the SAHWA Youth Survey 2016 (2017), this paper presents a study of the degree and types of political and religious participation - as well as the links that connect one to the other - among the youth of five Arab Mediterranean countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon). In politics, four types of participation are distinguished: official, everyday, community and protest. Between 5% and 17% of those surveyed could be considered hyperactivists, in that they participate in three or four of these types; in around a third, there was no participation at all. On the other hand, the majority of the young people considered themselves to be highly religious and, in three of the countries, a third attended the mosque at least three times a week. But the levels of religiosity did not influence political participation, as even the majority of the highly religious supported separating politics from religion

Transformation or reproduction? Trends with age in gender and class divisions in young single adults’ uses of free time in south and east Mediterranean countries since “the events of 2011”^*

© 2019, © 2019 World Leisure Organization. This paper urges resetting research into youth and leisure to match recent extensions of the life stage. It also proposes that the special mission of sociology within studies of youth and leisure should be to focus on “Big Leisure”, all of it, rather than a series of “little leisures”. These proposals are applied in analysing the findings from surveys of nationally representative samples totalling approximately 2000, 15–29-year-olds in each of five South and East Mediterranean countries (Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia). The results show gender differences in uses of free time widening, and differences by social class origins weakening but remaining influential throughout the extended youth life stage, while the influence on leisure of levels of educational attainment and labour force experience assist the reproduction of existing social class formations. It is argued that the failure of the “Arab Spring” to trigger wider social and economic transformations in the region is mirrored in young people’s uses of leisure which are helping to perpetuate existing divisions, thereby tending to stabilize rather than undermine the region’s Arab-Islamic version of modernity